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We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

fingerprint.com

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Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#211
post #15
post #3

Very cool research and wonderfully written. I was expecting an ad for their product somewhere towards the end, but it wasn't there! I do wonder though: why would this company report this vulnerability to Mozilla if their product is fingeprinting? Isn't it better for the business (albeit unethical) to keep the vulnerability private, to differentiate from the competitors? For example, I don't see many threat actors bur…

We don't use vulnerabilities in our products.

Any method of “fingerprinting” and invading a browser’s privacy is inherently an exploit.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the key thing about tails. You start it fresh every time from a clean usb stick or iso image. It's more than a browser restart, it's a complete system wipe every time. Tails is made on the premise that exactly this kind of trick will occur. Sometimes even persisting between browser restart. For that reason even the persistent storage is very limited. But that's optional and cautioned against for maximum an…

Nice, yes, a fresh Tails restart would definitely teardown the Fox process. And I think if you're disciplined, then purely ephemeral environments are the best mitigation for process-level state leaks like this IndexedDB ordering bug. For those who want an ephemeral setup but prefer the Chromium engine over Firefox, you can achieve a similar "destroy after use" workflow using BrowserBox. It has a tor-run function that…

Eh but that's a commercial tool. They don't even seem to have a free community version. I wouldn't pay for that. And prefer Firefox anyway.

For remote browser tools I use neko https://github.com/m1k1o/neko

But with Tor I like to have more safeguards. So I prefer to run tails in an isolated environment.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why "New Identity" wasn't implemented as a fork-and-exec with a newly created profile?

Follow the money.

Seriously. TOR is primarily funded by the US government. Maybe this or not all bugs are deliberately left in for the sake of allowing backdoors, but people should not forget this

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side channels that enable intended behavior, versus a flat-out bug like the above, though the line can often be muddied by perspective. An example that comes to mind that I've seen is an anonymous app that allows for blocking users; you can programmatically block users, query all posts, and diff the sets to identify stable identities. However, the ability to block users is desired by the app developers; they just may…

> Ultimately most fingerprinting technologies use features that are intended behavior Strong disagree. > IP address/cookies/useragent obviously are useful Cookies are an intended tracking behavior. IP Address, as a routing address, is debatable. > Canvas/font rendering is useful for some web features These two are actually wonderful examples of taking web features and using them as a _side channel_ in an unintended w…

Security by obscurity through morality? :)

The thing is, technology is either enabling something or not. The exploration space might be huge, but once an exploit is found, the exploitation code / strategy / plan can trivially proceed and be shared worldwide. So you have to deal with this when you design and patch systems.

Example: preserving paths in URLs. Safari ITP aggressively removes “utm_” and other well-known querystring parameters even in links clicked from email. Well, it is trivial to embed it in a path instead, so that first-party websites can track attribution, eg for campaign perfomance or email verification links etc. In theory, Apple and Mozilla could actually play a cat-and-mouse game with links across all their users and actually remove high-entropy path segments or confuse websites so much that they give up on all attribution. Browser makers or email client makers or messenger makers could argue that users don’t want to have attribution of their link clicks tracked silently without their permission. They could then say if users really wanted, they could manually enter a code (assisted by the OS or browser) into a website, or simply provide interactive permission of being tracked after clicking a link, otherwise the website will receive some dummy results and break. Where is the line after all?

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#215
Why is Firefox DB open-source MPLv2.0 running .cpp indexedDBdatabses() script on the API:

namespace mozilla {

namespace dom::indexedDB {

using namespace mozilla::dom::quota;

using namespace mozilla::ipc;

using mozilla::dom::quota::Client;

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, yes, a fresh Tails restart would definitely teardown the Fox process. And I think if you're disciplined, then purely ephemeral environments are the best mitigation for process-level state leaks like this IndexedDB ordering bug. For those who want an ephemeral setup but prefer the Chromium engine over Firefox, you can achieve a similar "destroy after use" workflow using BrowserBox. It has a tor-run function that…

Eh but that's a commercial tool. They don't even seem to have a free community version. I wouldn't pay for that. And prefer Firefox anyway. For remote browser tools I use neko https://github.com/m1k1o/neko But with Tor I like to have more safeguards. So I prefer to run tails in an isolated environment.

You're right that BrowserBox is a commercial product and there's no free tier. Honestly, the reality of running remote browser infra and development is that a free version just gets instantly hammered by botnets, scrapers, and abuse. Keeping it paid is the only way to be sustainable.

I see Neko brought up a lot, but honestly when I tried it a couple years ago it felt pretty clunky. It seems designed more for anime watch parties than serious security or remote isolation, IMO.

I totally get the Tails/Firefox preference, tho. If you want absolute baremetal isolation on your own hardware and have the discipline for it, a fresh Tails USB is definitely the right move. BrowserBox is just a different architecture -- it's mainly for when you specifically want an ephemeral Chromium setup on ... well ... anything, need some policy controls or programmability. And don't want to fiddle with config yourself.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#217
post #61

The OP's link is timing out over Tor for me, but the Wayback[1] version loaded without issue. Also, does anyone know of any researchers in the academic world focusing on this issue? We are aware that EFF has a project that used to be named after a pedophile on this subject, but we are more looking for professors at universities or pure research labs ala MSR or PARC than activists working for NGOs, however pure their…

>We are aware that EFF has a project that used to be named after a pedophile on this subject You bring this up like it's a well known incident, but my googling can find no evidence of it? The only reason not say the name of the project would be if it's common knowledge, but it's not? ChatGPT research reckons you're making it up, and I'd be curious if you have evidence to the contrary?

It used to be called Panoptoclik (sp?), a reference to Foucault's theory of the panopticon. Focault's extracurriculars are well documented and not everything is an "incident" -- it's a thread on fingerprinting. People who study that are aware what is now called "cover your tracks", and people who do post grads tend to be well rounded enough to have read a bit of philosophy, or at least, they did in my day.

So what happened here is basically... AI told you that something that made you suspicious because you have zero subject matter expertise is suspect?

I'm not really sure how to react to someone who has a robot affirm their anxieties other than to stand by my previous statements and give a polite pointer at some terms to look up on Wikipedia rather than feed into a clanker.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#218
post #61

The OP's link is timing out over Tor for me, but the Wayback[1] version loaded without issue. Also, does anyone know of any researchers in the academic world focusing on this issue? We are aware that EFF has a project that used to be named after a pedophile on this subject, but we are more looking for professors at universities or pure research labs ala MSR or PARC than activists working for NGOs, however pure their…

Mozilla is working on it. (I know you said 'Academic', but we publish papers sometimes too.)

I'd lump Mozilla into the bucket since it's a nonprofit and open source, it's hard to come up with an objective list of what makes an org "good" so sometimes it's been useful to fall back on the fact that at least in the states, academics are bound by the IRB.

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#219
post #86
post #61

The OP's link is timing out over Tor for me, but the Wayback[1] version loaded without issue. Also, does anyone know of any researchers in the academic world focusing on this issue? We are aware that EFF has a project that used to be named after a pedophile on this subject, but we are more looking for professors at universities or pure research labs ala MSR or PARC than activists working for NGOs, however pure their…

yes, there’s an active area of research on web fingerprint, both attacks and defences. Look at conferences like PETS for instance

pets is a good conference.

i also like anonbib as a central repo for interesting work.

https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/topic.html

Re: We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best is probably tor in a VM, chromium in a separate VM, javascript disabled, on a private virtual network, with a egress firewall (not just guest VM firewalls, but enable those too) that only allows traffic from a specific origin port on the tor machine. You would also want the VM to spoof the processor features and unique IDs. System time drift/offset remains a vector which is hard to deal with. Dump the render…

Your idea of "dumping the rendered window pixels out to a simple viewer" with Chromium is essentially Remote Browser Isolation (RBI). If you're looking for a packaged way to do this, BrowserBox does exactly this and has a tor-run function built-in, which: connects Chrome to a Tor SOCKS proxy and wraps all other browsing-related network calls over torsocks. It prevents local fingerprinting leaks (like this IndexedDB o…

That's great, I'll give it a try.
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